What sort of color difference are there. If there is a distinct color difference with the background 
you might be able to pull a mask off that. If you want to send me small hunk at full resolution I 
can have a look.

Britt


On 11/27/12 4:05 PM, Geoff Thompson wrote:
> Dear All,
>
>               I’ve photographed 6604 numbered fragments of an ancient Egyptian book of the dead.
> They had to be photographed on an acid-free grey background and are now on that under glass.
>
> They are 3,500 years old and were very fragile to handle. I photographed them with the 200 megapixel
> Hasselblad and sharpened them with Les Walking’s sophisticated smart-sharpen followed by his tweaked
> unsharp mask.
>
> It’s planned to try and put them together on a super computer digitally. Each one is numbered with a
> hand-cut label.
>
> In Photoshop I have been copying the base layer twice, adjusting the contrast a long way on one
> layer, using the magic eraser, selecting all the pixels remaining, turning off that layer, clicking
> on the next one up, checking the selection and adding to it if necessary, reversing the selection
> and deleting.
>
> This gives a good result but there are speckles remaining from the texture of the acid-free card.
>
> Has anyone any suggestions to improve the result?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Geoff

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